Vertical’s Eight New Ways Of Working

8 New Ways of Working is a combination of mind-set principles and concrete tools we’ve synthesized from setting up corporate incubators, improving customer experiences and developing new product offerings. Below you will find illustrations and insights for each individual of the mind-sets and tools.

Think Big – Act Small, Step 1: During the creation of new business opportunities, organizations must incorporate the Think Big – Act Small mind-set. The key to this approach is while aiming for an audacious goal, you break your goal into smaller deliverables. This will maintain momentum and motivation for the team, which is valuable because the journey will be full of ups and downs.

MVP-mindset, Step 2: When validating new business products, one of the most difficult challenges for established enterprises is to start with the Minimum Viable Product instead of the Maximum Value Product. As a rule of thumb, go for customer feedback as early as possible. Then, apply your insights to iteratively improve your product offering.

Fail Fast – Learn Fast Attitude, Step 3: In order for enterprises to fully reap its innovative potential, the organization, and in particular the management, must embrace a Fail Fast – Learn Fast attitude. To nurture this type of thinking, it is critical for an organization to carefully shape how intrapreneurial risk-taking affects career advancement, the perception among colleagues, and knowledge creation.

Sprints, Step 4: A sprint is an agile user experience and product design methodology that emphasize brainstorming, assumption testing and prototyping in the course of an intense and structured workshop program. When applied correctly, sprints accelerate critical learnings and product market launch.

Cross-functional Teams, Step 5: Gathering cross-functional teams with the right match of know-how is ideal for sprints. The mixture of different perspectives and experiences ensures fast decision-making while minimizing potential pitfalls.

Pretotyping, Step 6: Pretotyping is another powerful tool in the agile organization. In short, pretotypes are the most simplified imitation of your concept that allows you to get validation from real users. Out-of-the-box thinking and creative circumventions are encouraged when creating pretotypes. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, once said: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”

Customer Involvement, Step 7: Customer involvement is the bread and butter of an agile organization. When testing new concepts, you should get feedback from customers as early as possible. This exercise will fine-tune your compass. That said, focus on identifying the customers underlying needs, rather than the solutions they suggest. As Jeff Bezos from Amazon says: “It’s your responsibility to invent the things that your customers want”.

Fast Decision-making Framework, Step 8: A fast decision-making framework is a critical tool within new product development because nothing halts progress more than indecision. For more efficient decision-making, you should establish a clear set of rules, with transparent voting parameters, for evaluating new proposals. Not only does his support decision-makers, it also helps everyone with an idea understand how it will be evaluated.